I agree with the meat of your reply. Definitely if you spend too much time learning the fundamentals without any way to apply them, it's a waste. In the same way, if you spend too much time trying to brute force building something in a framework when you don't understand the underpinnings, a lot of that time is wasted. I think there's a nice balance where you're switching back and forth between the two approaches.
Learning jQuery before understanding Javascript first did work for me, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I can see lots of places where I struggled that I wouldn't have had to and where finding the solution didn't lead to much learning because my mental model had so many gaps.
The secret is to scale back what you want to build for your first few builds and fit it into vanilla JS. That way, you're not just learning vanilla JS for the sake of it. You've got a way to start applying it immediately. Graduate to your framework and the bigger app once you've built a couple in that space.
Not to suggest you can't still succeed by flipping this method on its head. That's what I originally did and it worked out fine in the end.
Thanks for reading and taking time to share your thoughts, Andrew.
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I agree with the meat of your reply. Definitely if you spend too much time learning the fundamentals without any way to apply them, it's a waste. In the same way, if you spend too much time trying to brute force building something in a framework when you don't understand the underpinnings, a lot of that time is wasted. I think there's a nice balance where you're switching back and forth between the two approaches.
Learning jQuery before understanding Javascript first did work for me, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I can see lots of places where I struggled that I wouldn't have had to and where finding the solution didn't lead to much learning because my mental model had so many gaps.
The secret is to scale back what you want to build for your first few builds and fit it into vanilla JS. That way, you're not just learning vanilla JS for the sake of it. You've got a way to start applying it immediately. Graduate to your framework and the bigger app once you've built a couple in that space.
Not to suggest you can't still succeed by flipping this method on its head. That's what I originally did and it worked out fine in the end.
Thanks for reading and taking time to share your thoughts, Andrew.